Factorio Forums

Why: Radar sector scanning increases saved game size and save/load times, by bringing terrain, trees, decorations, fish, nests etc into existence. If you want remote vision of your borders/outposts that means bringing ever more terrain into existence by being scanned by radars. I don't object to the scanning function of radars, but I only want to use it when I actually want to look for resources. I don't want it as a side effect of getting remote vision.

Best: Add a security camera which simply provides remote vision. Unlike the radar it should draw only a little power and be relatively inoffensive to biters. Basically could look like the speaker tower but with cameras instead of speakers. One could easily imagine additional functions, such as a circuit network connection which gives a count of enemy units in vision range, allowing players to make alarms in conjunction with the programmable speaker. If this is implemented remote vision should probably be removed from radars: remote vision is actually quite a powerful function and could easily be a mid level tech (around about robotics). Radars would just provide a map-level scan.

Acceptable: Add a tickbox to radar "Disable Scanning" or even better the ability to set maximum sector scanning range: set to 0 to disable scanning. This would be a good solution in terms of not adding additional entities.

I am aware that there are mods that add security camera style radars, but I think this would be a worthy addition to vanilla. I'm also aware this can be cheesed by making a separate grid and feeding it a ridiculously low amount of power

I like the idea of radar customization better.

Controllable radius of long-range scanning would be a nice feature.

Personally I'd also love to see the opposite - increased radius of long-range scanning by focusing the radar in a specific direction and maybe removing the remote vision aspect. I'm often playing worlds with very low resource frequency and normal/very big water - in those conditions advance knowledge of where to expand becomes critical sometimes, and even a 1-2 chunk of extra scanning range can make all the difference.

Lav wrote: Personally I'd also love to see the opposite - increased radius of long-range scanning by focusing the radar in a specific direction and maybe removing the remote vision aspect. I'm often playing worlds with very low resource frequency and normal/very big water - in those conditions advance knowledge of where to expand becomes critical sometimes, and even a 1-2 chunk of extra scanning range can make all the difference.

That would be cool. I'm all for making machines customizable, after all in some sense the engineer is our avatar and if we would make a machine work a particular way in his situation, we should be allowed to: within limits of course! too much can ruin the game with complexity.

Radars are currently one of the least customizable machines. Assemblers have module slots and recipe choice, inserters have circuit network and hand size, turrets can fire different ammos and receive upgrades, the programmable speaker has a ton of UI. So I think that adding one or two customization options to the radar wouldn't be out of place - especially considering the radar does have meaningfully customizable behaviour already.

Same is valid for the other screens (electric, logistic-...)

In radar map it would also be useful to see, which part some players are looking to (a rectangle, that visualizes a players view).